Compiling on MS Windows

In order to build this extension on MS Windows you will need a couple things.

First, a compiler. For the one click installer this means you should either use VC++ 6.0 or the compiler that comes with cygwin or mingw if you're building on that platform.

If you've built Ruby yourself, you should use the same compiler to build this library that you used to build Ruby.

Second, PostgreSQL. Be sure you installed it with the development header files if you installed it using the standard PostgreSQL installer for Windows. If you didn't, you can run the installer again, select "modify", and then select the 'development headers' option to install them.

I recommend making sure that 'pg_config.exe' is in your PATH. The PostgreSQL installer for Windows does not necessarily update your PATH when it installs itself, so you may need to do this manually. This isn't strictly necessary, however.

In order to build ruby-pg, just run 'rake'. If the pg_config.exe executable is not in your PATH, you'll need to explicitly point ruby-pg to where your PostgreSQL headers and libraries are with something like this:

rake --with-pg-dir=c:/progra~1/postgr~1/8.3

Adjust your path accordingly. BE SURE TO USE THE SHORT PATH NAMES! If you try to use a path with spaces in it, the nmake.exe program will choke.

Cross compiling for mswin32

Using rake-compiler, a cross compiled pg gem can be build on a Linux or MacOS X host for the win32 platform. The generated gem is statically linked against libpq and libssl; OpenSSL and PostgreSQL are downloaded and compiled from the sources. There are no runtime dependencies except the standard Windows DLLs.